On Screen

...No one who remembered Rizzuto in the days after his death offered such criticism, nor would it have been decorous to do so...

...As Hazlitt might have noted, it is always possible to break an earlier record, to get one more juggling ball up in the air...

...When that fails, their egos are devastated...

...Rosenbaum’s further assertion that “Bergman’s star has faded maybe because we’ve all grown up a little, as filmgoers and socially aware adults” approached the nonsensical...

...It does not bother them that the Bourne movies are knockoff hybrids of The Day of the Jackal and The Blair Witch Project...

...Crisis and The Passion of Anna eloquently detail the difficulties of romantic unions across the class divide...

...In fact, it is a plotless blur, shot largely in soft focus with a jittery steadicam, and making such frequent use of the zoom lens that one wonders whether director Paul Greengrass is on the payroll of a telephoto company...

...Despite commentaries to the contrary, Bergman and Antonioni were also enmeshed in the social and political events of their day...

...But if the obituaries were to be believed the former did little of significance after 1957’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and the latter nothing of note after Blowup in 1966...

...The director, he contends, had no “desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new...

...Whatever his personal failures, Hazlitt recognizes that he practices a craft with the potential to ignite the imagination of an audience...

...On Screen Lost Ways of Seeing the World By Raphael Shargel WHEN I READ the obituaries of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on July 30, and Phil Rizzuto, who passed on two weeks later, I was taken aback by their marked contrast in tone...

...Comparing what he calls “mechanical and intellectual excellence,” Hazlitt claims that the great artist, unlike the proficient gymnast, has the capacity to make others see the world through a sensibility that is not only awe-inspiring but also unique...

...It is set in a dozen cities around the world but with cameraworkthisnumbing and hazy, Greengrass could have made it on any street in Los Angeles...

...Watching it felt to me like being bashed over the head with a frying pan...

...The collective effect of the memorials for these men suggests that our culture—worshiping the mechanical while standing at cynical and superior distance from the intellectual—has failed to absorb Hazlitt’s wisdom...

...Reviewers have called it a brilliantly directed thinking man’s action flick...

...In Shame, Max von Sydow is a concert violinist whose household becomes a war zone, each side in the conflict demanding his loyalty...

...I did not know that he was already gone...

...The 5'6" shortstop played for the New York Yankees from 1941 to 1956, when the team was nearly indomitable, and had some spectacular seasons...

...This is a coward’s game, and the coincidental contrast with the lauding of Rizzuto made it especially unseemly...

...Indeed many claimed the directors’ stars had fallen because today’s audiences have lost interest in deep themes, as if the trivialities that now so often gain footing in art houses are signs of development rather than decline...

...My generation knew Rizzuto not as a ball player but as the announcer for the Y a nkees on New York television...

...Greengrass’ new film is indeed more incomprehensibly brutal than his previous offering...

...The movie’s hero, for reasons never fully explained, is endlessly pursued by the U.S...

...Bergman and Antonioni spent their careers breaking cinematic traditions, establishing new ones, and then breaking those as well...

...And while Bergman did sometimes return to favorite themes, he was, like Hazlitt, continually dissatisfied with his efforts...

...Picking up on an idea repeated in the obituaries, Rosenbaum suggested that Bergman s autobiographical films were puerile reflections of a psyche crippled by his strict father, a Lutheran minister, and his emotionally troubled mother...

...Yet one would be hard pressed to name a director who confronts the trials of social interrelations, of marriage, family conflicts, war, and dying more powerfully than Bergman...

...Bergman’s work, he said is “heartless...

...Stripped of his dignity and placed in constant fear for his life, he becomes a scavenger, betraying his friends and his wife in order to preserve himself...

...For a few pages the essay devolves into eloquent despair, but Hazlitt recovers by concluding that physical accomplishment, “manual dexterity,” can be learned...

...The detractors’ attacks on Bergman’s style are likewise misguided...

...The existentialist vogue of the ’50s and ’60s, with its thirst for stories about alienation, bolstered both men’s early popularity...

...Equally impressive are Pe r - sona’s cinematic depiction of mental breakdown, the vivid reds of Cries and Whispers, the shifts from color to monochrome in From the Life of the Marionettes, and the stunning use of white in Winter Light, Fanny and Alexander and Saraband—choices essential to the development of the narrative in each film...

...The quotations they gathered from scholars and cineastes were either equivocal or vague...

...Writing in the British Guardian, Brian Baxter mined a similar vein...

...Is there no one thing,” he asks, “in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw...

...Some columnists saw the directors as relics, Bergman from the late 1950s and Antonioni from the early 1960s...

...It would be wrong, however, to blame Bergman and Antonioni, as this year’s obituarists did, for the fact that fans of an earlier generation distilled them to a fad...

...Scenes from a Marriage and Saraband offer the cinema’s most eloquent meditations on men and women incapable of living under the same roof, even though they love each other...

...The Devil’s Eye and Smiles of a Summer Night recast Shakespearean romantic comedy as a cinematic experience...

...Many of Antonioni’s finest films, from Story of a Love Affair, his first feature, through L’ A vventura, La Notte, Eclipse, and Red Desert, focus on people who derive their sense of self-wor th from their ability to carry on a romantic relationship...

...Through a Glass Darkly, Hour of the Wolf and Persona reveal how the world appears to those in the grips of consuming psychosis...

...Ye t as Rizzuto’s eulogists were beneficently polishing his image, others were using the occasion of the passing of Bergman and Antonioni to tarnish their legacies, taking advantage of the fact that the artists were now no longer able to defend themselves...

...If it were true that Bergman’s works are childish in comparison with what we can view today, we would be living in a Golden Age...

...The writers who called them major artists and key figures in the cinema world appeared familiar with a mere handful of their films, and found those more confusing than enlightening...

...At his retirement, he ranked second all-time in career double plays...

...The Magician, Fanny and Alexander and In the Presence of a Clown convey the power of the theater with a vividness that has scarcely been equaled...

...The widely mocked Zabriskie Point, made in the U.S...

...I suspect that many critics and some audiences nowadays go to the theater in order to simulate the experience of being clocked in the cranium, that for them this is somehow a satisfyingly visceral experience...

...government, and the pointless chase that occupies the entire running time is punctuated by Bourne’s violent assaults on his pursuers...

...Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander detail the psychological consequences of a stifling religious upbringing, but the disparate effects observed in an array of characters cannot, as Rosenbaum suggests, be reduced to the plaint of a single ego...

...in 1969, is considered by many to mark Antonioni’s descent into an abyss from which he never recovered, but its first 10 minutes, depicting a group of disparate college students planning a demonstration, is probably the best exploration of campus radicalism in narrative film...

...Rosenbaum accuses Bergman of borrowing his visual form exclusively from the theater...

...But we are not...

...But to love it on such terms is like calling Barry Bonds a genius because he broke Henry Aaron’s home run record—and without the guilt, for unfortunately there are no rules against shooting a film that looks like it was made on steroids...

...The season of grief calls for celebration and fond memories...

...The broadness of such descriptions, of course, does little justice to the intense detail of Bergman’s brilliantly acted films—more than 60 of them in a 60-year career...

...Bergman’s brilliant and varied use of the camera make for pure cinematic experiences...

...In addition, counter to the conventional wisdom about Bergman’s obsession with God’s silence, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring and Winter Light deal with protagonists tormented not by doubt but by faith...

...Jonathan Rosenbaum, in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, insisted that Bergman was incapable of innovation and could not hold a candle to stylistic mavericks like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard...

...THEN THERE WERE the attacksthe worst of them aimed atBergman...

...Ye t viewers who have experienced the terrifying dream sequences in Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, Wild Strawberries and The Magician are unlikely to forget them or to confuse them with anything they have seen on stage...

...The f ilm creates nothing remotely resembling excitement...

...Throughout his career he continued to reach for new things, experimenting with cinematic form and content into his 80s...

...His enthusiasm and tendency to speak in malapropisms won him the love of most fans, but some of us bristled at his grating voice and insipid commentary...

...They can be appreciated today only by those who perceive the distinction between innovation and excess...

...Shame is the best film I know about how cruelty may be rooted in cowardice...

...They seemed comfortable implying that although some may be excited by art that makes demands upon an audience, they themselves could not be bothered...

...Bergman was 89 when he died Antonioni 94, and both remained active in their later years, making their final films in 2002 and 2004 respectively...

...As Hazlitt might have noted, there was no lack of f ine shortstops in Rizzuto’s time...

...Pressing the comparison button, he cited Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini as directors whose “poetry and originality transcend matter and realism...

...Phil Rizzuto’s excellence would have been viewed by Hazlitt as entirely mechanical...

...Like Renoir and Ozu, Antonioni and Bergman shared an abiding interest in the health, progress and decline of communities...

...Nor could he be escaped during commercials, where he frequently appeared as the spokesman for a dubious enterprise called the Money Store, selling his name and reputation to endorse usury...

...After attending an athletic exhibition, Hazlitt is in awe of the performers’ ability to suspend balls in the air with seeming effortlessness...

...WHILE PREPARING this column, I made the mistake of taking a break to see The Bourne Ultimatum, recently released to universal raves...

...Bergman saw him as a rival and possibly was disturbed that a filmmaker preoccupied with tedium and malaise was lauded above him in some circles...

...Upon hearing that Bergman had died, I remarked to a friend that Antonioni must now take his place as the greatest living filmmaker...

...But without Bergman and Antonioni film history would have been deeply impoverished...

...To become familiar with his work is to recognize the tremendous variety of subjects he took up...

...As for thematic profundity, Bergman was said to wither alongside Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, austere masters with whom he is often juxtaposed...

...Bergman revealed the hidden terrors within a blond-haired blue-eyed socially responsible culture that seemed a utopia to many in Europe and America...

...Plenty of men could have taken his place...

...But the particularly frustrating aspect of the notices following his death, no matter what attitude they struck, was their tendency to reduce Bergman’s oeuvre to a handful of pictures that repeat the same ideas...

...Shame and The Touch bracingly confront the psychological legacy of the Holocaust and the Cold War...

...Why does an abortion like The Bourne Ultimatum capture more attention and command more patience than any production of genuine merit...

...What, he wonders, has he accomplished in his writing that could match their balletic grace...

...Musing ov er what seemed a confusion of priorities, I returned to one of my favorite essays by William Hazlitt, “The Indian Jugglers...

...They are sufficiently stimulated by this blathering to feel free to label Greengrass an artist...

...in 1950, he won the Most Valuable Player Award...

...Even the respectful Bergman and Antonioni obituaries had little grasp of their subjects...

...Antonioni undercut the open and affable image of Italians often portrayed in the works of his predecessors...